You have been eaten by a grue: vintage text-based games on your Kindle

Enterprising gamers are formatting vintage text-based adventure games for the …

Enterprising gamers are formatting vintage text-based adventure games—at the time of this writing, the legendary Zork I-III and 1988’s less-legendary Mini-Zork—for the Kindle and other dedicated e-readers.

Everyone agrees that E Ink screens render text beautifully. E-readers’ slightly older but tech-inclined demographic definitely includes lovers of vintage games. And the ability to save and reload games using Amazon’s Whispernet is a nice feature.

Are the Zork games at times frustrating? Yes—maybe even more so on the Kindle, where text entry isn’t as fluid as on a full keyboard. (You occasionally have to enter in numbers, and the alt+Q=1 shortcut is a lifesaver there.) Are they immersive and addicting? Yes. And I’m not even very old; these games and I are about the same age.

Could text adventure games on the Kindle benefit from including a few images here and there and introducing slightly more intuitive gameplay while staying within the text-based-adventure genre? I think they could. There’s no reason why mid-to-late-80s RPGs, like my beloved Ultima and Wizardry series, couldn’t be made to work on the Kindle. And that, my friends, is the future of Kindle gaming — just twenty-odd years too late.

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War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

Neither Ars nor the site they link too mentions it.. but this is just a website.

There is no need at all to hit it on a Kindle.. it works fine in just about any browser on any device.

I never thought these were as good as.. um.. books. As long as I have a steady stream of books I can't put down on the kindle, I have little interest in playing these.

The other thing to note and Ars should have picked up on this, is these were mentioned in the comments a couple weeks ago. Since then, they must have gotten copyright takedown notices.. because there are only 4 available games right now, last week there were 10+.

MUD is a "Multi-User Dungeon". The best way to describe them is sort of a hybrid between an MMO and a text-based adventure game like Zork (MMO's actually evolved from MUD's). You have descriptions of the world and creatures that are all text-based, and navigate around and perform actions by typing them (go north, examine dog, etc), but you're doing it in an environment with other players. Wikipedia has a decent description and history at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD.

Ummmm... you can purchase the original "Choose Your Own Adventure" books for the Kindle now. Check them out on Amazon. Though they are a bit pricey at $5.59 a piece. I'd prefer the entire Lone Wolf set of books myself. On even the old CYOA rip offs that were Dungeons and Dragons based. I really loved those too way back when.